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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1893.
"Plate XIIIa represents Vishnu with four arms. With one of his left hands he is raising his gadú, or club called kaumôdaks. The figure on his left is not quite clear, but seeme to be an attendant."
It will be observed that there are the remains of an inscription on Plate XIIIa by the right arms of the large figure. I tried to make it out on the stone and failed, but from a plaster cast I had taken enough could be seen of it to determine the characters to be Burmese of the Kyaukså type.
Plate XV. fig. 2.
This plate represents the tablet found in Pegu by Mr. Taw Sein-Ko (ante, Vol. XXI. p. 385). In the Phayre Museum there are three more such tablets: one from Pegu and two from Pagàn.87 There is a number of such tablets in the British Museum and in the South Kensington Museum, brought thither from Buddha Gaya itself. They seem to be intended to memorialize in a small space the life of the Buddha, after the fashion, on a much larger scale, of the stone slabs pictured by Oldfield, Sketches from Nipal, Vol. II. p. 56, and quite lately in Part II, of the Journal of the Buddhist Text Society.
The inscription on this particular tablet, which is in medieval Northern Indian characters, proves beyond all doubt, irrespective of its general form, that it is a specimen of a distinct class of votive objects found in great numbers at Buddha Gayâ. In Plate XXIV. of his Mahabodhi, Sir A. Cunningham figures several of the tablets he found ard calls them "terracotta seals," and I think the best explanation of them is that given ante, in Vol. XXI. p. 385, footnote, viz., that there was a factory of such objects at Gaya for the pilgrims, who took them thence all over the Buddhist world of the time as keepsakes and relies, and presented them to their own places of worship on their return home. The tablet figured in the plate is almost identical with the much finer specimen figured by Cunningham as fig. E, Plate XXIV.
The only special remark I would make about it is that the serpentine objects towards the top of the tablet (see figure below) are not serpent heads, but the leaves of the bodhi tree, known to the Burmese as nyaungywet.
The institution of formal pilgrimages to Gayâ from Burma is proved by the inscriptione there, dated in the 11th century A. D., and it may be fairly argued that the presence of these tablets in Fagan and Pegu is due to the pilgrimages made from the former place in the 11th century and from the latter, under the auspices of the great revivalist king Dhammachêtî, in the 15th century. Dhammacheti is well known to have sent a large pilgrimage to Gayâ.
57 See also Crawfurd's Avd, p. 60. In Forchhammer's Report on the Kyaukku Temple at Pagan, similar tablete are shown on Plates VII. and VIII. Nos. 15, 16 and 17, but not described. Phayre, Hist. of Burma, p. 14 f., seem to refer to these tablets and so does Clement Williams, Through Burmah to Chind, p. 57.
